Nocturnal dreams were ‘pilgrimages to the underworld.’ Reveries were ‘flights.’ This meant that night-dreamers contented themselves with oneiric tunnels opening right in front of them. The equivalent for daydreamers were utopian horizons.
Reverie became somnolence, somnolence reverie. Daydreams could easily pass or slide into night-dreams, and vice versa, when relished in a hypnagogic state. A dream of sexual fulfillment, for instance, could furnish a similarly themed daydream.
Transition in one direction, from reverie to dream, was marked by a ‘prolapse,’ or a fall downward. This was because the nocturnal dream had more ‘gravity’ as a self-contained world. Things found in it were ‘dream-real.’
Reverie, meanwhile, was the reverse, a ‘fall upward.’ Neither fall was fatal, but they exposed the ‘eggshell structure of so-called normal consciousness.’
Yet, for all their overlap, the two sorts of imagination remained irreducible to one another. The night-dream seemed to me to have no dreamer in it, as though there were no cogito there, no organizing consciousness. And yet some dreams were quite lucid. They created a sense of being simultaneously inside and outside looking in: both dreaming and daydreaming, asleep and awake.
Dreams and reveries were thus mutually permeable, intruding upon each other. Daydreams succumbed to the weight of sleep, to the gravity of their ‘night doubles,’ by hitting ‘air pockets.’ Conversely, absorbing them could lift certain oneiric moments, turbulent and convulsive, to where ‘dreams levitated.’
And where, toward what regions, did they levitate? The ‘beauty, truth, and goodness’ of pure reverie. Night-dreams took on a higher coherence thanks to its poetic power. They grew wings and took to the air. When this happened and they united, dreams expanded consciousness.
In contrast to a night-dream, a reverie could not be recounted. But as it reached poetic heights, it lent itself to words and images, unique systems of inscription and depiction tantamount to poetic creation. There reverie ‘played out its true destiny’: it became beautiful. If a daydreamer had ‘the gift,’ they would turn their reverie into a work of art.
‘Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic détente,’ said Chevauchet, making a fine point. ‘It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight attached to the real as a kite is to the hand of a child. Under normal conditions, it does not yield an alternative reality. The horizon cast by it is thus not a world unto itself, even when inconsistent with the way things are for the daydreamer. But neither is such a horizon merely an extrapolation from the real. Although they are more tethered to reality than night-dreams, reveries are freer.’
By following ‘the arc of reverie’ – its strange, contradictory trajectory – waking consciousness, light as a feather, relaxed and floated. It ‘clouded over,’ and could be profoundly altered. The benefits were innumerable.
‘Happiness is an idea that has not aged well,’ he mused. ‘Reverie comes to its rescue: It models well-being and puts it back on the map. The daydreamer and their reverie enter totally into the substance of felicity. You must tell whoever wants to be happy to begin by daydreaming well. This door to happiness stands open to everyone: building castles in the air, châteaux en Espagne, costs nothing!’
‘But all this costs time, and time is valuable,’ I objected. ‘The living body must be fed. And isn’t the policy precisely to universalize reverie? Wasn’t ci meant to buy us time?’ I was dismissed with a wave of the hand, like someone who had clearly not reflected on the matter from all possible sides.
‘Nihilominus, nihilominus,’ was his answer to me on this and similar occasions, to indicate that my point was moot and his firmly standing. He frequently cited reverie’s ‘irreality function’ as useful in keeping at bay ‘the hostile and foreign world in all its brutality.’ By ‘reverie’ he meant, of course, the true and salutary, not the false, bastardized, ci kind. Without reverie, there was anguish, hopelessness, ennui, and misery. And when, ravaged by them, the mind fell apart, the body would soon follow.
Daydreaming was no less a gateway to happiness for being solitary. ‘In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux that can accommodate anyone. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy. Happy moments return and are embellished, irradiated by a feeling of well-being.
‘And that is another difference between night-dream and reverie. The dream remains overloaded with the individual’s badly lived daytime passions. Solitude becomes equivalent to hostility. It is strange and uncanny. It isn’t quite one’s own solitude, but something more generic. And when this solitude gravitates toward the muted, the suppressed, and the censored, the result is nightmares.’
The daydreamer’s fantasy, on the other hand, linked by a myriad filaments the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of human consciousness, which is to say, with works of art. It reconnected ‘on its own terms’ the night-dream to reality. And, most crucially, it preserved the collective and individual memory of freedom.
Fantasy as a distinct mental process was born and at the same time abandoned as soon as pleasure became subordinated to the principle of reality. Daydreaming appeared lax, untrue, and useless once reason prevailed, exacting, correct, and useful. It became ‘mere’ play, dismissed as what it always was: indeterminate, ubiquitous, and mutable. Indulgence in it became a source of shame, refraining from it a source of pride. But any such triumph over oneself was satisfying; there was no real defence against pleasure. And if it could not be beaten, pleasure might as well be accepted. Not only could it then be managed, but also infinitely degraded.
From pleasure it is but a short step to reverie. As such, and even when out of practice, daydreaming continued to speak the language of the pleasure principle, of freedom from repression, of the gratification of uninhibited desire. But reality fell into place and proceeded according to the laws of reason, hostile to the language of reverie. Nevertheless, fantasy retained the structure and tendencies of the psyche prior to its organization for reality, prior to it becoming individual, set apart from other individuals. And by the same token, its creative imagination preserved the memory of the subhistorical, of a time ‘when the life of the individual was the life of the genus and of the species, the image of the immediate unity between the universal and the particular under the rule of the pleasure principle.’ In contrast, ‘the entire subsequent history of man is characterized by the destruction of this original unity.’ ‘Original unity’ was Chevauchet’s magic charm, the universal formula.
Chapter Twenty-One
A pond can look bottomless when its surface reflects a sun or a sky. It seems all surface, with no suggestion of space below. Only evening reveals its depth. The sun, sinking, peels off the surface and leaves it black, an endless hole.
But to me all ponds and lakes looked alike, regardless of the impression they made as the day ran its course. They possessed at once their fragile sheet of glass – the same vitreous film, crystal-clear and paper-thin – and a profundity that was stronger than a mere suggestion. Like some mountain lakes, which, the higher up they are and the more perfectly they reflect the surrounding nature and clouds, the wider they open my eyes onto the abyss, as if by cutting away the cilia, the lids. Naked, circumscribed surface over seemingly infinite depth, and in this much like an eye – the eye being the image of a pond in the human head, not vice versa.
Since my new friendship, my time alone became rarer and rarer, though I cherished it. My thoughts gained in clarity what they lost in complexity, as they glided in aleatory fashion and would sometimes slow down so completely as to put me in mind of a snow-white swan floating upon still water.
One warm October day, Chevauchet seemed positively starry-eyed. We met, as usual, by the pond in the park.
‘I still have much to show you,’ he said. ‘The part of Greater America where we built the embassy.
’
It was a moment I had been waiting for, and I followed willingly, preferring an experiential outing to yet another lecture, however enlightening. Now that I had all the theory, I was interested in its application. I had blazed trails with him through the dark wood of nocturnal imaginings, and saw many that were in use. But the community of dreamers he envisioned, and on which he pinned his hopes, eluded me.
We circled around the lake. To think that I had been this way so many times and never before noticed the faun sculpted on the side of a boulder as if clambering up it, with a grimace and fearful glance cast downward over his shoulder, fleeing something. The park had an underground history, constructed as it was over horse shambles and a wasteland of old gypsum quarries, used to make plaster of Paris.
We passed the Carrefour de la Colonne, where several paths met, and where of the statue of a shepherd in pursuit of a wolf only the pedestal was left. It had been melted down during the last war for cannons to the occupying forces, along with The Glaneuse, a female gleaner inside the parkette at La Chapelle, the sculpture Illusions and Regret in the Gambetta Quarter, and the Place Clichy’s statue of Charles Fourier. They were never restored.
‘When all that’s left is mythical fear and empty pedestals,’ wondered Chevauchet, more to himself than to me, ‘who will chase away the wolves?’
We exited the park and walked up Tunnel Street – a close enough pass – which rose and then dipped down as one hiked toward the Buttes and imagined that a seashore lay just the other side of this hump-of-a-beached-whale-ofa-hill.
We then took the Avenue of the Seventh Art, its name a nod to Ricciotto Canudo, a champion of cinema, and to the Studios Gaumont, once the largest in the world, which produced such silent gems as Fantômas and The Château of Cards at a time when Hollywood was still a citrus grove. Leaving the Combat Quarter, we proceeded down Rue des Solitaires, a street of which Chevauchet seemed particularly fond, and whose narrowness indeed favoured solitary walkers. We wound our way through the Villa du Progrès to the convergence of the streets Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty, where they begin or end. Here the neighbourhood no longer resembled postcard Paris or even the rest of the Quartier d’Amérique in which we now found ourselves, but a provincial town or a village. We chose Rue de la Fraternité and, eventually turning left, came to the entrance to the Hameau du Danube, or Danube Hamlet, a proto-gated community, apparently a relic of the English 1920s garden-city movement, itself inspired by turn-of-the-century utopian socialism. Access here was restricted to residents, but we managed to sneak in anyway and ambled unnoticed along wet cobblestones, admiring the architecture.
It would be difficult, Chevauchet pointed out, to find a residential complex with greater density of reference to the revolutionary-utopian past. But from the ensuing silence I guessed something was amiss, which had to do with the fact that a city so proud of this history preferred it imparted by street names and untold plaques. Most of the Hamlet’s houses had been attractively modernized, sacrificing the original rusticity.
‘Shameful!’ he exclaimed finally. I had never seen him so agitated. ‘They chip away at the place as though it had been left unfinished! The original idea is perfectly lost on them. They are wrecking a living museum. And for what? For their own damn convenience. They live only for themselves. Oh, they dream all right: they fantasize about better jobs, better cars, better vacations. Not better lives. A better life is not just the sum of its parts!
‘Come, we’d best be on our way. We won’t find any dreamers of promise here, not anymore.’ And he gestured for us to go.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We ended up at a pleasant bar, where light drugs were traded, and the clientele, neither cool nor all that young, was less distracted, practised in medicating the profound. The alchemy of the place was such that one’s sense of time was suspended, regardless of what music was playing, what one had taken, whether or not one was high, and whether the door was closed or open. This ambiance had everything to do with its name: le Rêve, the Dream.
We sat down for a drink and chatted with the current owner, ‘The Headless Woman’ (in tribute to Max Ernst), and none of it seemed quite real.
‘That’s what brings them here,’ she laughed, when I mentioned the effect her café had on me. ‘It’s long been a favourite with writers, you know. They flock here to daydream. To escape reality. And I’m happy to help.’
I asked how long the Dream had been around.
‘Oh, hard to say. It’s the kind of factual question I rarely get,’ she added, winking. ‘My guess is at least since the end of the last war.’
I asked Chevauchet to describe to me what the other customers were fantasizing about. To my surprise, he did not invite me to see for myself, as he did with dreams. He said they were cosmic reveries, of the type that are tricky to access and impossible to narrate – a state of mind at once profoundly solitary, asocial, and outside time, what the Neoplatonists called melancholia mentalis. I gave the washed-out faces around me the once-over, and since they betrayed nothing of the sort, I had no choice but to take him at his word. So, the gap between the ideal and what existed made one melancholy … Sensing my skepticism, Chevauchet assured me this was one of the last communal spaces where daydreams could be hatched like plots against reality.
The first of their kind had been the legendary Black Cat, le Chat noir. But the problem was that its two facets – the masonic and the aesthetic – which had gone international, did not communicate and collaborate. The diplomacy of the masons was completely obscure to the artistic youth that gathered there to stage their shadow plays. What the first conspired in spirit, the second should have vested in symbolic spectacle appealing to the senses. Obviously, neither masons nor artists – a.k.a. dreamers and daydreamers – alone could stage a revolution; only the two together.
‘It is a little-known fact,’ continued Chevauchet, ‘that the Black Cat was initially the Black Swan, in memory of 1789. The French Revolution – the original one – was like the “black swan” of the philosophers: something that had been thought impossible, inconceivable even, until it manifested itself, shaking the foundations of historical understanding, putting almost everything into question. This question mark needed a name, and since its shape was a bit like a swan (a cygne, being in French a homonym for “sign”), even though they had never seen one like it (for its feathers were black), they felt compelled to call it a swan, and to accept that there were things beyond their ken that might yet come to pass and topple the old order, washing away what were hitherto certainties. That was the perceived effect of the Revolution, irrespective of whether you were for or against it. The assumption until then was that all popular risings were revolts. And revolts, like rebellions, insurgencies, and such, could be contained and put down. What happened, however, exceeded all expectations, except those that were mad, the brainchildren of visionaries.
‘Alas, a black swan was heavier, more fatidic, than a black cat. That made it less suited as the name of a nightclub that was all about making light. So, in the end, they decided against it and went with le Chat noir. And they never got up to anything beyond mischief. All because an old occult emblem found by Fulcanelli in a certain château and familiar to the rich patrons of the future cabaret cast the swan as a suicidal creature. Propriis pereo pennis, I die by my own feathers, if I am not mistaken, was the emblem’s motto – a veritable swan song, as the bird’s neck is pierced by an arrow fletched with its own plumes. They did not much like the association. It was worse than bad luck. Like shooting yourself in the foot, since feathers are not for killing but for flying, and for writing. Anyway, compared to a popular superstition, it was too recherché.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
We headed north, and on the way passed the Museum of Eroticism, which was closing its doors. Its dissolution proved that Paris was changing. Many of the objets on display scrupulously catalogued for auction had not sold. These circumstances turned the place into a museum of itself. On a
whim, moved by nostalgia more than sexual curiosity, I proposed that we step inside, even if the daydreams evoked in us, tardy visitors, could only be predictable and uninspired. But I was to be proven wrong.
Coming from all four corners of the world, the exhibition’s remnants were of a bewildering variety, the ancient pressed against the modern, the tawdry beside the tastefully fake, the serious touching the humorous, the exuberant tickling the deadpan – there being truly something for everyone, from the happy-go-lucky tourist to the most discerning amateur. I particularly liked a miniature coffin made of wood, whose cover, when slid aside, revealed the expected skeleton. But as one proceeded to remove the lid, his erect member popped up suddenly. I recalled seeing another toy of this kind: the figurine of a priest, his chasuble shrouding the same gross indecency.
I was not the only one fond of the obscene little coffin; an old woman stood next to me eyeing it as well. She liked the way the object provided, in the form of a toy, a synthesis of life and death that was light, lowbrow, and unpretentious. It was a pity that its surprise would soon consign it to oblivion or a private curiosity cabinet, and that the associations it aroused directly, regardless of its maker’s intention, would hereafter be available only in roundabout, high and heavy fashion, out of the way of many who could appreciate its unsubtlety, which was more to their taste.
The most beautiful and titillating work in the collection was surely a very large painting on wood of an angel visiting Teresa of Ávila, whose pale habit resembled a great unmade bed. It was a mechanical object, its mechanism broken. The sole moving part, also the sole piece of flesh visible below the saint’s face, in the picture’s bottom half, was her foot, which, pink and dainty, ever so slightly undulated. The painting drew inspiration from her ecstatic vision, in which an angel had pierced her with a flaming sword, then withdrew it along with her entrails. The creature stood smiling above, speckled with blood, with one hand raising the sheets covering her breast, with the other flashing its gold ‘arrow.’
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